Escaping the Filter Bubble: Evaluating Electroencephalographic Theta Band Synchronization as Indicator for Selective Exposure in Online News Reading

TL;DR

This study demonstrates that EEG and eye tracking can serve as real-time indicators of selective exposure in online news reading, enabling systems to promote diverse perspectives.

Contribution

The paper introduces an integrated experimental setup combining EEG and eye tracking to detect selective exposure during online news reading.

Findings

Theta band power correlates with agreement to news content.

EEG and eye tracking can identify selective exposure in real-time.

Potential for interactive systems to promote balanced information diets.

Abstract

Selective exposure to online news occurs when users favor information that confirms their beliefs, creating filter bubbles and limiting diverse perspectives. Interactive systems can counter this by recommending different perspectives, but to achieve this, they need a real-time metric for selective exposure. We present an experiment where we evaluate Electroencephalography (EEG) and eye tracking as indicators for selective exposure by using eye tracking to recognize which textual parts participants read and using EEG to quantify the magnitude of selective exposure. Participants read online news while we collected EEG and eye movements with their agreement towards the news. We show that the agreement with news correlates positively with the theta band power in the parietal area. Our results indicate that future interactive systems can sense selective exposure using EEG and eye tracking to propose a more balanced information diet. This work presents an integrated experimental setup that identifies selective exposure using gaze and EEG-based metrics.